beaux livres : photo, architecture, art

L’Invention d’une île

Thierry Fontaine / Christine Ollier / Simon  Njami

It is not easy to classify the work of Thierry Fontaine, which straddles the boundaries of several genres. While his preferred medium is photography, it would be difficult to define him as a photographer. His various works are more akin to actions, to staged scenes whose image he then captures on film.

In Thierry Fontaine's work, different levels of perception are simultaneously generated by the symbolism of the image, its poetic charge, and the way in which the artist creates it. He indeed pushes the tools of what could be called his "image-making" quite far.

It is not easy to classify the work of Thierry Fontaine, which straddles the boundaries of several genres. While his preferred medium is photography, it would be difficult to define him as a photographer. His various works are more akin to actions, to staged scenes which he then captures on film. While Thierry Fontaine is an artist with contemporary practices whose work aligns with the most cutting-edge Western approaches, he remains deeply connected to his culture. He is a native of Réunion Island, and in doing so, he incidentally connects us to his homeland. In this way, he speaks to us of exoticism and raises the socio-political question of our perceptual codes and the prejudices that still hold non-dominant cultures captive. Yet, Fontaine avoids political correctness at all costs. He elegantly disarms the cynicism of some or the attempt at recovery by others because he intimately knows where he is and where he wishes to place his work, an inclination he shares with the Martinican poet Edouard Glissant.

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